Every single thing you see is made up of elements in the periodic table. Ever since scientists first cobbled together these catalogs of nature’ s building blocks in the 19th century, they have doubted if there was any termination to the elements and their variants( called isotopes). It’ s a deep question at the heart of the physical universe. At the present
Dawn Shaughnessy time, we have 118 elements on the books, differentiated by the number of protons in their nuclei.
About 26 of these elements, however, do not exist in nature. Over the years, physicists have fabricated new, short-lived and characteristically supersized elements( as well-defined by their atomic number) by colliding atomic nuclei together in particle accelerators. Many of the fascinating isotopes also have arisen from these colliders. Annoyingly, though, we might first hit a wall when it comes to forming new elements beyond the 92 natural and 26 man-made elements that presently exist. That’ s because today’ s atom-smashing methods are near their theoretical and technological boundaries.“ We think we have a path forward to element 120,” says Dawn Shaughnessy, a chemist and project leader of the heavy element program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Whether we can get past 120 is anyone’ s guess, she says.